My first, paperback, edition of this book disappeared long ago, the hardback I bought in a bargain basement got lost in my attempts to settle down and write about it here. Like Gloucester flinging himself off a cliff that isn't there, on his way to Dover, the effect of it is hard to describe, although the mechanics seem quite clear. The scene has some of the hypnagogic strangeness of all false falls: the stair we miss as we fall asleep. After the drop, the narrative pushes through to the restaurant, breaking into an optimistic present tense as she walks off into the dawn. Each of these functions as a single note in the major chord that is the 'worker-hero' Nicholas Temelcoff. There is the archived, historical past of the Prince Edward Viaduct, the human past of Nicholas's journey from Macedonia to North America, and the immediate past of the nun's fall. Looking at it now, I can see - sort of - how he does it interweaving various past tenses with the heroic present of Nicholas labouring on the bridge.

So it is a bad influence: maybe writers, like teenagers, have no other kind. These are difficult, almost occult forces dangerous to the act of fiction. I turn to it for solace, and to see how it is done, and to question the role of miracle, coincidence and accident in whatever book I am writing at the time. I have reread this section of In the Skin of a Lion many times over the years. 'She disappeared into the night by the third abutment, into the long depth of air which held nothing, only sometimes a rivet or a dropped hammer during the day.' And she is caught, by Nicholas, below.

No mention is made of the size of her wimple or the ballooning of her skirts, but it must be her clothes that catch the wind. 'For night work he is paid $1.25, swinging up into the rafters of a trestle holding a flare, freefalling like a dead star.' The nun has no name. He dangles below the top level, working with equal ease in darkness or in fog. The worker is Nicholas Temelcoff, a daredevil who walks to the edge of the bridge and 'steps into the clear air' leaving nothing to see but 'the fizzing rope, a quick slither'.

In the skin of a lion